Armageddon - Max Hastings [4]
I hope that readers of this book will find much that is new to them, as its discovery was new to me. Even after fifteen years’ exposure to Western historians, Russian archives remain wonderful sources of new material. I feel no embarrassment about sometimes accepting conventional wisdom. After almost sixty years, it is unlikely that great secrets remain to be revealed about the conduct of the Second World War. The challenge is to improve our perspective upon it, and to reinterpret available evidence. Most new books which claim to have uncovered sensational revelations about the war prove to be rubbish. In the eighteenth century Oliver Goldsmith took a view noted by Boswell: “When Goldsmith began to write, he determined to commit to paper nothing but what was new; but he afterwards found that what was new was generally false, and from that time was no longer solicitous about novelty.” I remain “solicitous about novelty,” but follow Goldsmith’s unwillingness to pursue innovation for its own sake. Many of the stories in this book are not state secrets—they simply represent the setting down of experiences which have been unremarked, and discussion of issues which seem neglected. One cautionary note is a commonplace for historians, yet bears rehearsing for readers. The statistics given in the text are the best available, yet many—especially those relating to casualties—are highly speculative. Error is inescapable when covering a huge canvas and addressing points which will never be conclusively resolved. All large numbers relating to the Second World War should be treated with caution.
I have been writing books about this period for twenty-five years. Familiarity does nothing, however, to diminish one’s awe in the face of the summits of courage some men and women attained, the depths of baseness others plumbed. After listening for four hours to the story of a Hungarian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who lives in New York’s Queens, my wife and I waited for a taxi to take us to Kennedy Airport to catch a flight to London. It did not arrive. I grew visibly anxious. “Relax!” cried my hostess cheerfully. “It doesn’t matter. When you have been in a death camp, you come to see that missing an aeroplane is not very important!” I blushed then, and I blush now, that I could have displayed before such a woman a preoccupation with trivia which is characteristic of the twenty-first century, and which our parents and grandparents perforce shed between 1939 and 1945. My own gratitude never diminishes, that our generation has been spared what theirs endured. I believe passionately in the truth of the words inscribed upon so many war memorials in the United States and Britain—“They died that we might live.”
The first part of this book is chiefly about what uniformed combatants did to each other. Later, emphasis shifts to the human experience of all manner of people who found themselves in Germany in 1945. It should never be forgotten, however, that few of those wearing uniforms thought of themselves as soldiers. The tide of history had merely swept them into an unwelcome season’s masquerade as warriors. They, too, were “ordinary people.” It is sometimes suggested that too many books are written about the Second World War. Yet the stories still untold about the conflict’s human sagas are so extraordinary that it seems a privilege to make a modest contribution to recording them, and to setting them in the context of the most significant event of the twentieth century.
Max Hastings
Hungerford, England
January 2004
THE PRINCIPAL COMMANDERS AND THEIR FORCES
Although the names of many military commanders who feature in this story will be familiar, it seems helpful